


A Little Honest Dirt

by icarus_chained



Category: Airwolf
Genre: Armor, Comrades in Arms, Disguise, Friendship, Gen, Pilots, Spies & Secret Agents, Survivor Guilt, Truth & Lies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 07:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/884786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stringfellow Hawke watches Dom and Michael circle each other, and considers armour and honesty and reasons to let yourself smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Honest Dirt

**Author's Note:**

> I've just watched the first season of _Airwolf_ for the first time in YEARS, and I've fallen madly in love all over again. *grins sheepishly* So ... Have a little fic to let me vent adoration, yes?

"I'm just saying," Dom repeated, with the air of a man who knew his wisdom was falling on deaf ears. "A man oughtn't to be afraid of a bit of honest dirt."

String glanced over, looking away from the white silhouette fading through the noon heat-haze towards an equally white limousine. Dom was wiping a cloth over grimy hands with the air of a man cleaning his sword after a bout and following Michael's progress across the airfield with a mix of wicked glee and something that might, just possibly, have been fond exasperation. 

Mostly, though, he was looking put-upon.

Involuntarily, String felt his eyes crease at the corners, a little bubble of something warm and long-denied pushing surfacewards. He stifled it, more from habit than anything, but also because grinning stupidly at Dominic Santini when he was feeling put-upon was not the wisest course a man could take. Not if he wanted to avoid distractions, anyway.

"Don't think it's honest dirt he's afraid of," was all he said, looking back out at the steadily limping figure. Measuring out words like they cost more than jet fuel, Dom would have said, but he guessed he sounded thoughtful enough that Dom let it pass this time.

"No?" his partner asked, raising an eyebrow as he looked across, sarcasm you could've seen from thirty thousand feet. "Sure coulda fooled me, then." He grunted, tossing the rag back onto the workbench. "Man walks onto an active airfield in a shiny white suit, what's he _think_ is gonna happen?"

String did grin there. Let himself. It wasn't as rare a thing as it used to be, these days.

"Maybe he thought you weren't the type for bear-hugs on a first date," he noted wryly, remembering Michael's rigid stance and appalled expression as the exuberant Italian pulled him into a 'friendly' embrace, deliberately clapping oil-stained hands all over the shoulders and back of his very, very white suit. What was the phrase? If looks could kill?

And, right now, if looks could indict. Dom's face was a picture of unholy glee, trying valiantly to look like innocence. Failing kinda spectacularly.

"What can I say?" the man demurred, with an expression of pious innocence no jury in the state would've bought. "I'm a friendly guy. Right, String?"

"Right," String agreed amiably. What the hell. Wasn't like any jury could hang Dom without him anyway.

But it wasn't really a lie, he thought. Leaning back against the hangar wall, listening to Dom retreat noisily behind him, watching Michael's limo vanish into the silence in front of him. Basking quietly in the warmth of the day. It wasn't really a lie.

Dom _was_ a friendly guy. Even if it was taunting, testing, even if he was being friendly mostly to see how riled up he could make you, it still wasn't _mean_. It wasn't what Dom would do to an enemy. Or even a stranger. He figured Michael knew it, too. Dom with a mop was a threat and a warning. Dom with a hug or a backslap and oily hands was something else.

Still a warning, maybe. Not a threat, though. Not the same way.

And it wasn't honest dirt Michael was afraid of, either. The spy wore his signature white-on-white as a challenge, as a statement, and as armour. Thicker than the Lady's plating, and aimed against much the same sort of threat. Wasn't dirt he was afraid of, no.

It'd taken String a while to peel it down to base, that suit. All the little layers from eccentricity to distraction to statement to challenge. A nice little tactical exercise, a puzzle to while away slow hours. Michael had a nicely twisty mind. Made it fun to work around him. Dangerous, too, but String knew himself well enough to realise how close those counted together for him. 

He knew why, too. Could see it reflected in their eyes sometimes. Dom, pained and forgiving, full of old grief. And sometimes Michael, tinged with regret and a touch of guilt. Because Michael really did nurse a sense of honour, didn't he? Tucked it down away like a secret shame, and admitted to murder sooner. 

Wasn't much surprise he drove Dom up the wall, really. Wasn't much surprise they _both_ did.

It started as a distraction. The suit. The first layer was a blind, sun-dazzle on snow, a bizarre and cheerful flash of elegant eccentricity, disguising chasms. 

To this day, String wasn't actually sure how much of the suit was Michael deliberately going out of his way to create an image, and how much was Michael channelling actual eccentricity to a more pointed aim. He couldn't have come up with it by accident, after all, and it took a certain kind of mind to jump to panama hats. 

But maybe it didn't make that much difference, in the end. They said the best covers were the ones closest to the truth. And it did work. Same as Michael's little verbal soft-shoe, yield and yield and cajole and yield, until suddenly there was no more give. Until suddenly you slammed right up into the wall behind the blind, and it was the man who could sidestep six governments at a time you were facing. White and strange and amiably eccentric, until you suddenly had reason to remember that the cane and the glasses were there because this man had faced down gunships and survived.

Guess if you were half-blind, made sense to turn the rest of the world snow-blind in return. Was only one place the one-eyed man was king, after all.

Next layer was more obvious. You had to step wrong to catch the first, had to fly into the radar dead-zones. This one, you just had to listen to Marella, or have an idea of Michael's sideways sense of humour. Because the next layer ... was the joke. Irony, self-reference, and an oddly earnest statement all at once. 

Wearing the white hats. Archangel. How can you tell the good guys from the bad, with all the blood on everybody's hands. Wearing white because everyone knew that wasn't the colour under it. There was a lot of dirt under those white suits, those white hats. Not the honest kind. They all knew that. So it was a joke, a wry little nod to the business they were in and what it really made of them. 

But it was honest too. Maybe not for the FIRM, but for Michael, for the people who wore his uniform. Wearing white to show what colour they were _aiming_ for. To show that whatever else they were, whatever they did to accomplish it, Michael's people were fighting on the side of angels. The lie and the reality all at once, and not too much difference between them. 

Leave it to Michael to wear that as a badge of honour. Make the lie the uniform of choice, and make it truth at the same time. That was a sense of humour for you.

And then, down at the bottom. Down at the base, where the reasons were more personal than goal-orientated, where Michael wore his uniform by choice and not by design. Down there, flying under 50 ft, the suit was _armour_ , armour and a challenge, the bone-deep dare you got at the heart of a man. The part of him that stood up in front of the world and dared it to do its worst.

That bright, white suit. Clean as a whistle, pure as mountain snow. Untouched.

Untouchable.

Man walks onto an active airfield in a shiny white suit, what does he _think_ is going to happen?

But Michael wasn't any man in a white suit. And what _Michael_ thought was going to happen was that no-one was going to be stupid enough to mess with him, no-one was going to dare break that perfect white shell. 

And he thought that ... because no-one _had_. Because he was walking through all the dirt in the universe, honest and otherwise, and that suit was _still white_. Because nobody'd broken it yet, and he was wearing that plain for all to see. Because he was walking onto an active airfield in a shiny white suit, and if it weren't for Dominic Santini he'd have walked back off it the exact same way.

It was a lie, String thought. Of course it was a lie. There was a limp under that suit. There was an eyepatch disguised in the dazzle of it. There were lies buried under it, and betrayals, and enough scars to write two decades' worth of history. Someone had shot that suit to hell. Someone had stripped that suit away to shove the man beneath it in a torture tank. Someone had buried that suit under a pile of burning rubble and 30mm rounds and put a Hellfire in to cap it off. That white shell, that armour plating, had been blown to hell more times than the targets down the range.

But you couldn't know that to look at him. That was the point. Michael stood there in that perfect white suit, the cane an affection, the crazy uncle who'd fallen off his horse on a lazy ride, maybe got in a shooting accident once, explain the eye. Michael didn't stand there looking like a man who'd been shot to hell. He didn't look like a man who'd been blown up, like a man who'd been betrayed, like a man who'd been tortured. He didn't look like he'd ever been touched.

And because of that, he looked untouchable. He looked unbreakable. Michael put on his armour, down where it was personal, and he looked like nobody could hope to touch him.

 _Except_ , String thought, with a small smile for the cheerful banging behind him. Michael looked like nobody could touch him ... except Dominic Santini.

And he'd looked appalled, hadn't he. He'd looked disgusted, long-suffering. But he hadn't _stopped_ Dom. He hadn't iced over, hadn't pulled rank or knocked Dom back. Dents in his armour, knocking holes in the disguise, marking out vulnerabilities across his back. Might as well put up a sign: 'Not so untouchable after all'. Might as well invite down the blow. And Michael _let it happen_.

Because Dom was a friendly guy. Because Dom wasn't an enemy, and those kind of dents, they weren't the kind that had Hellfires following after them. Because Michael _knew_ that. Because Dominic Santini was, if not quite a friend, at least someone who might have been, in a different world. Because the only one watching was String, and nobody was putting holes through that armour while he was around. Because at Santini Air, the man in the white suit wasn't Archangel, he was _Michael_ , and that did count for something. 

Because there was a sense of honour lurking somewhere down under that white suit, and a sense of humour too, and String suspected it was worth that small denting of defenses to have a place where those were safe things to show. Because the armour was personal, and when it was personal he could choose where and when to lower it, couldn't he.

Honest dirt. Not the other kind, not the blood and the slick taint of lost lives and betrayed honour. Not the kind that white armour was built to stand against. The stuff on Dom's hands, that was _honest_ dirt. With Dom, it couldn't be anything else.

And Michael wasn't afraid of it, no more than the Lady feared small-arms fire. He was annoyed by it. Aggravated, amused. But not afraid. Never that.

Michael, like String, knew a good man when he saw one.

Dominic Santini. Man who could make a deadly Lady sing, a scarred pilot fly, and an armour-plated spy put up with grubby fingerprints all across his soul. Pilot, mechanic, stunt-flyer ... and lion-tamer extraordinaire.

"Hey, String? You gonna stand around looking pretty all day, or you gonna help me put this baby back together? Because I don't know about you, but I'd like to get _paid_ sometime this month."

String shook his head, pale creases mapped around his eyes that the sun was only partly to blame for. He leaned up off the baked wall, taking one last glance out over the horizon a pale limousine had passed across a while back, before turning back into the noise and the shade and the honest, cheerful dirt of Santini Air.

Yeah, he thought. He was letting himself smile a lot more than he used to these days, wasn't he?

But hey. At least he wasn't the only one.


End file.
